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> The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious (https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it

> The author helped build Quantum Computing For The Very Curious (https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc) as a proof-of-concept and, IMO, it shows just what the bottleneck in "learning" from any kind of text is. I think Quantum Country is extremely well made and an interesting idea, but come on: The idea of interspersing text with exercises is hardly revolutionary. In physics (which is my background) a regular textbook consists of chapters which each present a smaller topic followed by a bunch of exercises you should solve. The way you work through the book is by solving the exercises. Everyone knows that just reading the text is not enough. The author usually writes explicitly in the introduction that "the only way to learn this is to work through the exercises". A good book will have exercises which require understanding a mixture of the earlier chapters as well. Most of the exercises will focuses on what's new in _this_ chapter, but suddenly you need calculate some "basic" formula that was presented early on. Textbooks don't use spaced-repetition as described by SuperMemo, but they use many similar techniques. The page you linked to is enormous (91 pages printed it seems; although that's with a pretty big font) and looking through it seems to have 17 "exercises" and that is including some very basic ones as "What's the standard notation for the NOT gate?". How can they claim that it's not "learning from text" when they have a way bigger text-to-exercise ratio than any textbook I've read?

jfarmer 6y ago
Don't get me wrong, I meant that QCVC shows the opposite of what it intends: the bottleneck is _not_ lack of clever "memorization technology." They even kidna realize it themselves when they say "This works better w/ context." Well, ok, so how do you rapidly create context?! Well-written, well-framed, and well-sequenced exercises are great at that, especially if there's a healthy feedback loop.

jfarmer 6y ago

Don't get me wrong, I meant that QCVC shows the opposite of what it intends: the bottleneck is _not_ lack of clever "memorization technology." They even kidna realize it themselves when they say "This works better w/ context." Well, ok, so how do you rapidly create context?! Well-written, well-framed, and well-sequenced exercises are great at that, especially if there's a healthy feedback loop.